Providers of information technology (IT) services are increasingly faced with a demanding, competitive environment in which end users continually expect to be provided with, not only high quality services, but IT services which are available when the user needs them. This has led to providers of IT services ensuring that their IT services are available for use 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and 365 days of the year, in order to meet the demands of their users. If a user is repeatedly faced with IT services that are not available, the end user will soon take their business elsewhere.
The term IT services may comprise many different types of services available to a user for example, on-line banking, an on-line auction system, a payroll management system, a time recording system, a data backup service, or any other type of applications that may be provided by a service provider. Further IT services may comprise core IT services for example data backup, replication of data, producing daily reports and any other type of service that a business needs to be able to carry out its daily activities.
All IT services are supported by information technology systems which may cover the design, development, installation and implementation of IT systems and associated applications, for example, core services such as data backup and replication in order to operate effectively. Each IT system providing an IT service may comprise a plurality of software or hardware components, which may be deployed across a number of different servers and distributed across different geographical regions.
IT service providers offer services to perspective customers that must meet the requirements set down in a service level agreement (SLA). A service level agreement sets down the terms and conditions that shall be met when providing a particular service. For example, the scope of the service to be offered, performance, tracking and reporting, problem management, warranties and remedies, intellectual property rights and confidential information etc.
Often an end user complains of poor customer satisfaction because from the perspective of the end user, the IT service is not available when needed or the IT service gives poor performance at key times of the day. For example, if each employee in a workplace is required to record their worked hours by 3:00 pm each Friday, the time recording system will experience a heavier than normal amount of network traffic logging onto the system. If an IT component fails that is critical to the time recording system then the impact to the business is also critical. Alternatively, from the viewpoint of the service provider the impact of poor performance varies depending on the date and time at which the IT service is running. For example, a user may only log onto a time recording system at 3:00 pm on a Friday afternoon and continually experience poor performance. Therefore from the perspective of the user, the time recording system continually exhibits poor performance. From the service providers viewpoint the impact of poor performance may only be noticed at 3:00 pm on a Friday, because for the rest of the week, the time recording service exhibits a high level of performance due to low user usage.
In order to provide high quality IT services, it is vital for service providers to understand a customer's business and the impact that a failure of a component will have on a particular business requirement. For example, the impact of users not being able to record their work time, as the impact may not only affect the time recording service, but also may have a down stream impact on other IT services that may either be supported by the failed component or the IT service can not start because the service is reliant on the time recording service completing before it can start.
Traditionally users have viewed IT services as a single entity that has a binary state i.e. the IT service is working and available for service or is not available, and therefore the failure of any component that supports that IT service has a similar weight i.e. working or not working. This is often not the case, as a customer's business is made up of many IT services deployed across different components and the IT services may have different availability requirements.
WO 01/79994 describes a business process engine which hosts the execution of electronic business processes and generates event objects for communicating the state of the business process to a business rule engine. The business rule engine hosts the execution of business rule functions triggered dynamically in response to the event object. A business management engine hosts the generation of business reports reflecting system status.
However, this approach has disadvantages because the relationships between a component such as a piece of software or hardware and the IT service that is using that particular component is not identified and therefore a true representation of the availability and criticality of an IT service can not be achieved for any given time period.